Dodo takes blame for internet outage affecting millions

ISP Dodo played a role in causing the outage that affected millions of fixed-line and mobile internet connections across the country this afternoon, Dodo's chief has confirmed.

"To be perfectly frank the extent of what happened was more than anybody could've thought," Dodo managing director Larry Kestelman told this website in an interview, adding his team was still investigating exactly what caused the issue.

"What it looks like has happened ... is a very minor hardware failure on one of the routers that has caused some big issues between ourselves and Telstra and had a flow on effect to others which it absolutely shouldn't have," he said.

"Telstra is saying that there were some overseas routing issues as well - but to me it sounds like it was a combination of things that caused it."

Speculation the outage was caused by Dodo first appeared on the Australian Network Operators Group electronic mailing list - a list many Australian network administrators subscribe to - and spread to broadband forum Whirlpool shortly after.

The outage began about 1.40pm AEDT, lasted about 45 minutes, and affected customers nationwide after Telstra lost connectivity to its international data network, a Telstra spokeswoman said in an email. "Customers who couldn't access international sites were then overloading domestic sites causing major issues in accessing Australian sites as well."

"Some customers may currently be experiencing intermittent issues and slow speeds when accessing the internet. This is due to a large increase of users and traffic on the internet at the moment following the national outage we experienced this afternoon.

"We are working with the wholesale customer in relation to the outage to find out what occurred in our respective networks to prevent it happening again."

Customers of ISP iiNet were also affected by the outage, the Peth-based ISP said on its website. But the ISP's chief regulatory officer, Steve Dalby, said the ISP was able to "route around" the issue.

The CommBank website and NetBank were also affected by the outage but were now back online, a Commonwealth Bank spokesman said. A number of other Australian organisations that rely on the internet to do business were also affected.

Internet users said on Whirlpoolthat their connections were out in Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Townsville, Tasmania, Canberra, the Gold Coast and Perth.

"Work internet is down, and I work for a telco... Ummm hmmm...," tweeted @skkng from Sydney.

"Okay, who broke the internet? @iiNet and @Telstra both down. My trusty @Optus prepaid mobile broadband to the rescue!" tweeted another, @KimSkildumReid, also in Sydney.

[<a href="http://storify.com/curious_scribe/telstra-outage" _rte_href="http://storify.com/curious_scribe/telstra-outage" target="_blank">View the story "Telstra outage" on Storify</a>]